Pirate Party founder Falkvinge calls for re-legalization of child porn

[AFK]

All of those ideas are awful and provide no merit whatsoever for making child porn legal.  A child cannot legally nor developmentally ever give consent or permission for images of them in those kinds of situations to be published and shared.  By that reason alone, it should remain illegal.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

They're the market.

Supply and demand, if the market is out there and they want to buy, somebody's going to make things to oblige them.

Yep.  There's a shitload of money in it.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Images of child abuse are evidence, like proper evidence in a potential criminal investigation or court case. If you have any then, IMO, you have no excuse other than icky not to turn them in to the cops and explain where they came from. If you don't and instead keep them for personal entertainment then fuck you, fuck your rights to anything.

I am aware that what I've said is in danger of undermining my stance on censorship, free speech and a whole heap of other things. I'm more than comfortable with this. Every rule has exceptions.

[Verbal Mike]

What I understand from the Falkvinge post is that a person who turns in such images as evidence, even in situations where the images are purely a documentation of abuse that for some reason could not be stopped, would be put in prison for having possessed the images. If that's the case, the laws that make it so are abominable.

Anyhoo, not much point discussing an article that almost nobody in the discussion read, and those who did (especially myself) are too lazy to properly summarize...

[East Coast Hustle]

Yes, well, that probably happens all the time.

[P3nT4gR4m]

What I understand from the Falkvinge post is that a person who turns in such images as evidence, even in situations where the images are purely a documentation of abuse that for some reason could not be stopped, would be put in prison for having possessed the images. If that's the case, the laws that make it so are abominable.

Anyhoo, not much point discussing an article that almost nobody in the discussion read, and those who did (especially myself) are too lazy to properly summarize...

Okay I finally got the chance to read it. I agree with most of his points, given that he's not talking about right and wrong, he's talking about the law, which, as usual, is about as far from right and wrong as it's possible to be.

[Verbal Mike]

Thought I'd link to the followup article just posted. I haven't read it yet and hardly anyone else here will, but whatever.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-bad-as-you-think-theyre-much-much-worse/

[Verbal Mike]

Read it now. It's mainly rebuttals of common arguments, including some raised here. Also references to concrete cases in which innocent people's lives have been ruined by these laws. Including a link to a Spanish article in which the Spanish police complains that this type of law makes it difficult/impossible for them to persecute child abusers and abuse pornography distributers, because people sending them links are breaking the law and hence the evidence is non-permissible. (Was too lazy to read it in depth, would be cool if someone with better Spanish than mine felt like summarizing it.) Similarly, Swedish police complain that these laws make it difficult for them to crack down on child abuse because they are forced to hunt down people who have manga images in which too much of a cartoon child's body is shown (Swedish, too difficult for me to figure out, if someone else can that would be interesting input too.)

Anyhoo, altogether, this piece seems focussed on how these laws incriminate innocent people and make catching real abusers more difficult. Clearly, there are other aspects to this – I didn't see anything on the argument that child abuse imagery has to be stopped on the demand side, for example.